[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

You're right! I was generalising from my personal experience without proper data.

Of course your original point still stands anyway, at least to an extent.

Spoiler:

Regardless of how many people are still around who are, in fact, vaccinated against smallpox (some further googling tells me that it was still commonly done in the US until 1968-1970, and officially ended in 1972), there are still entire generations of younger people who are not vaccinated - in the US, where the series mostly seems to take place, I assume we can say "the overwhelming majority of people born after 1970" - so the risk is still major.

Also, this is reminding me that I should probably read some more of the Merchant Princes series. I read the first one and found it okay - not awesome enough to really want to continue, but then I ended up getting my mother the translation of the first book and she enjoyed it, so I do now have the second and third book as translated versions, too and could, in fact, give those a try...